The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) today confirmed the discovery of the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle popularly known as the "God particle" that is essential for understanding the world around us. According to statements by CERN scientist Joe Incandela, by now it is totally clear that what they found last year in their experiments was the Higgs boson, "although there is still a long way to go before we know what type of Higgs boson it is about ". That is, if it is the boson of the Standard Model of particle physics or the lightest of bosons predicted by theories that go beyond the standard model.
Whether or not it is a Higgs boson is revealed in the way it interacts with other particles, as well as in its quantum properties. For example, a Higgs boson has no intrinsic spin or moment of rotation, and in the standard model its parity – a measure of how its mirror image behaves – must be positive. The CMS and ATLAS experiments of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have analyzed various options for spin-parity of this particle, and have shown that, indeed, they reflect a value of 0 for spin and positive parity. This, together with the interactions that have been measured of the particle discovered in July of last year with others, indicates almost definitively that it is a Higgs boson.
Boson detection is a very rare event, with about 1 trillion proton-proton collisions required for each observed event.
